


These Three Words

by AgentCoop



Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: 5+1 Fic, Angst and Feels, Angst with a Happy Ending, Artist Steve Rogers, Canon Compliant, Canon Divergence - Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain America Reverse Big Bang 2018, Catholic Bucky Barnes, Catholic Steve Rogers, Eventual Happy Ending, Friends to Lovers, Hurt Bucky Barnes, M/M, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-World War II Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, Self-Sacrificing Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers Feels, Steve Rogers and the 21st Century, Suicidal Ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-03
Updated: 2018-07-03
Packaged: 2019-06-04 18:39:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15153233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AgentCoop/pseuds/AgentCoop
Summary: The first time Steve dies, it’s an accident.The second, it’s a choice.When Bucky dies, it becomes a creeping desire. Each death comes with an onslaught of beautiful memory, and he will do anything to get back there, to relive his moments of joy with his one true love.The last time? Only then does he realize how much he truly has to live for.OR5 times Steve dies, and 1 time he lives.





	These Three Words

**Author's Note:**

  * For [megara (valkyrieismygf)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/valkyrieismygf/gifts).



> Thank you so much to [Megara](https://megara-arts.tumblr.com/) for allowing me to write this story! I'm so thankful I got the last minute chance to incorporate her beautiful artwork into a 1940s story (my ultimate fav!)
> 
> And thank you so much to [Dani](http://mystrana.tumblr.com) for her constant support, cheerleading, and beta-reading.

****

The first time Steve dies, it’s an accident.

It’s hot and humid in their Brooklyn apartment, and the air is so muggy it feels like he’s breathing liquid. There’s a burn in his lungs that he ignores--he’s cooking, and the steam wafting up from the vegetable stew on the stove in front of him is so thick with the scent of paprika that he can almost taste it. He blames that for the heavy, oppressive weight on his chest.

Bucky’s in the other room--the only other room of the small apartment. Steve can hear him singing as he shucks off his shoes and heavily greased garb. He always does this. Steve can watch the children play in the street below until the moment the sun ducks below the maple tree in the front of their tenement, and within a minute, Bucky will be at the door.

He’ll walk in and smile, and it will light up his whole face enough that Steve can’t stand another second without pressing his lips to Bucky’s mouth, but Bucky will always turn and walk to the bedroom--desperate to get out of the clothes he’s been in all day, the clothes that reek of ocean from the hours he picks up at the fish market.

The very breeze from the open window is wet with heat at the back of Steve’s neck. He’s dizzy, but he keeps stirring and watching the vegetables--waiting for the moment it thickens precisely prior to burning at the bottom of the pot.

It’s not until he feels the rattle in his lungs as he draws in another breath of cloying spiced steam that he thinks there might be a problem.

“Bucky?” Steve calls. His voice slips out quietly, weakly, and he shakes his head and tries to breath deeply and evenly. His movements are disjointed--his entire body gives a heave of motion and he drops the spoon, the wood clattering across the kitchen linoleum. “Buck!”

It’s not an asthma attack. He knows that and recognizes the signs. It’s hard to breath, but it’s not the gasping, rattling, panic-induced attack that wakes him in the night. This is something more. It burns now. His whole body is on fire--waves of searing heat traveling his down his veins and through his arteries. His arm starts to shake, and he blinks. _Bucky,_ he thinks as he collapses to the ground.

Somewhere beyond his sensibilities, the singing stops.

_Steve’s ma was a proper church-going lady. She worked every shift she could and then some, but nothing could stop her from Sunday mass._

_Steve loved it._

_There was something so beautiful about the ritual of it--the bowing heads, the mutual amassation of guilt released free to soar above them. Even the very language of church tasted of Heaven. He let the foreign Latin slip fluently from his tongue, as though they were set free from their prison of the heart to dance freely to the clouds. He watched as the priest read from the Holy Book and blessed his flock and distributed the body and blood of Christ. Back home, he knelt until his knees were bruised at the foot of his mattress._

_He thought perhaps he could become a priest one day._

_The congregation of Saint Cecilia's was as varied as the city’s own occupants. There were dockworkers who came before their shifts and immigrant families who bowed, barely speaking any English. There were lower class families who straggled in with flocks of grubby children in tow, and there were lovely ladies who wore their feathered hats and white furs and smiled delightfully at the squalling babies as though they were all truly equals here in God’s house._

_Steve took to showing up at a service daily during the summers. Sarah Rogers was always at work, and Steve was stuck in the roasting apartment alone most days. He’d wander the neighborhood, looking for new places to sketch and draw, and most afternoons his feet took him to the Chapel. He had a favorite pew as most church-goers do and he would wedge himself into that center row, directly under the stained glass portraiture of St. Francis, and he closed his eyes._

_On a particular Wednesday afternoon, in the heat of August, there was a splat at the back of his neck._

_Steve’s eyes shot open, but he held the rest of his body still and reserved--not wanting to disrupt a single moment of the liturgy. His fingers slowly crept up to smooth at his short blond hair, and then down the backside._

_Wet._

_He drew his hand back and studied the paper between his fingers for a moment--rolling the sticky ball back and forth under calloused fingerpads._

_Another spitwad hit him--this time behind his ear._

_Steve pursed his lips, then slowly turned to eye the pews behind him._

_The sanctuary was far from full, so there were only a couple of choices. There was an older man who watched the priest up front with eyes of fire and religious zeal. There was a young mother with her arms around a pair of toddlers who were restless and agitating each other.There was a rich woman, hair delightfully coiffed from underneath a small pillbox hat. She had her head bent in prayer--her hands clasped in front of her face. Steve watched her mouth open and close as she silently moved through an evening devotion._

_And beside her sat a boy._

_He watched Steve with interest, a quirked smile playing about his face. Steve scowled back, then turned once more in his seat. He listened to the sermon, nodding along and occasionally taking notes in his small leatherbound notebook that his mother had purchased for him as a gift. He felt eyes on him and concentrated on not squirming, uncomfortable at being watched, uncomfortable at drawing any sort of attention to himself._

_A third spitball splatted against his outstretched wrist._

_Steve didn’t turn. He held his head higher and waited until the end of the service.He stood quickly to walk back and speak with the degenerate youth, but much to his dismay, they were gone._

_Steve walked down the pew they had been seated in, gazing at the space.The hymnals were all in their correct place; there wasn’t a single bible out of place. It was as though they had never been. He shrugged, bowed towards the altar, then walked out of the building into the bright sunlight of a perfect Brooklyn afternoon._

_The boy was waiting for him._

_“Ey!” He called_

_Steve stopped in surprise. He was tall--taller than Steve was, though that didn’t take much--and had thick, curly brown hair. He was still wearing that ridiculous grin, as though incredibly pleased with the forethought and temerity with which one such as he must have to execute a feat involving spitballs._

_“Hello.” Steve walked up to him and tilted his head up to match his gaze, then prodded the boy in the chest with his forefinger. “You, I think, are a bit of an imbecile.”_

_The boy watched him, emotions dancing across his eyes that Steve couldn’t quite place, and Steve readied himself for another fight, another ridiculous reason to come home broken and bloodied for his Ma to patch up._

_Instead, the boy burst out laughing._

_Steve stepped back, confused now, unsure of what was expected of him. In front of him, the kid grabbed at his chest, wheezing from laughing so hard._

_“Bucky,” he gasped out, holding out his hand, and Steve took it tentatively._

_“Steve.”_

“Your heart stopped for a moment,” they tell him. The heat and humidity of the day triggered a brief asthma attack that he’d not even realized was happening. With the consistent lack of oxygen and without proper medication, his heart was working extra hard to keep him breathing.

As he stood stirring stew in the old tenement apartment, it finally had enough.

Bucky coddles him. Keeps him wrapped in blankets well after the doctor leaves and makes chicken soup. It tastes terrible, but Steve smiles at him anyways and lets him pour it down his throat.

 _“You died,”_ Bucky says in a choked up voice, tears threatening to spill at every moment.

 _“I came back for you_ ,” says Steve.

He’s strapped so tightly into the metal tube that he can’t breathe, and he knows he’s surrounded by doctors and medics and scientists and equipment that cost more money than he has ever imagined in his entire life, but he’s scared. He doesn’t want to die without saying goodbye to Bucky.

He catches a glance out the thin window of the machinery and can see men and women looking down at him from a viewing gallery. He’s an experiment now, owned and operated by the government, but despite the anxiety gnawing at the lining of his gut, he knows he made the right decision.

He won’t watch the world crumble beneath his feet without doing everything in his power to fight it.

The machine whirs to life, and suddenly he’s on fire, liquid pain burning its way through his cells. He’s felt this way once before, and his heart rate increases. He’s scared now--his skin feels tight and tears painfully away, and his bones shift despite the thick strapping that is holding him perfectly in place.

The white light is there again.

He’s died before, and what people say is true. There is light, and it’s a beautiful, heavenly thing, but there is also a heavy silence that echoes hollowly in his ears. This time, he knows what’s happening, and he’s fighting it every step of the way. He will _not_ die before seeing Bucky again. He will not.

The heaviness swallows him whole.

_Bucky got his papers on July 7th--three days after Steve’s birthday. Steve knew they had more time than most--Bucky isn’t due to ship out for training until November. They had the rest of summer. They had the fall._

_This mere scattering of days together did nothing to soothe the ache in his chest that haunted him._

_Steve tried to enlist._

_The first time, the medic laughed at him and sent him on his way. He went back home, shoulders tense and eyes angry. Bucky yelled and swore, and Steve screamed back. They wouldn’t take him because he was small, because he was sick, because he was useless to a military battalion. He knew it, but he couldn’t let Bucky do this alone._

_Every morning he woke up now and saw the haunted expression in Bucky’s eyes. He grinned at Steve and made placid assurances, but they both knew the truth of the matter. The boys of Brooklyn had been shipping out for two years and only a few ever returned home._

_They tried to make the best of it. Bucky worked long hours to save money for Steve to pay the rent while he was gone, but in the evenings they sat out on the small porch of the building and watched the sun fall from the horizon, casting the city in its dusky, bloody glow. Steve drew Bucky then, framed his face against the backdrop of New York, against an ocean, against the heavy wilderness of the West--a place they both talked of going together when he returned._

_Indoors they touched each other as though they might never feel the embrace of true love again. Every moment was simple and exquisite and perfection. Every rub of their bodies etched into the folds of Steve’s mind, carefully hidden away until the moment came for him to draw them back._

_Steve tried to enlist again the week before Bucky’s deployment, and this time, he was accepted. They stamped his papers and sized him for a uniform and sent him back home with a deployment date overseas in just two weeks time._

_He was shocked it worked, and there was a small fragment of something sharp in his belly that rocked with fear._

_The only reason he’d been accepted was that they needed every possible fighter. They’d use him. Put him in a batallion that was meant for sacrifice--to draw enemy fire._

_This time, Bucky cried when he found out. He didn’t swear, he didn’t yell. They didn’t fight._

_He cried and held Steve and Steve whispered to him over and over that he loved him, that it was going to be alright, that they would survive this together._

_Because people always underestimate him. And Steve’s a fighter._

_They spent their last night at the apartment. Bucky put a record on their old Victrola that Steve’s Ma had left behind. They let the rough and sultry voice of Ella Fitzgerald wash over them and out into the starry night sky as they sat outside, holding hands. Steve bent his head into the perfect space between Bucky’s neck and shoulders, and they didn’t say anything. They didn’t need to._

Bucky falls.

Steve’s screaming, and his arm is still outstretched. The space between them grows further and further apart, and he can already feel the burning electricity between them fade from the pads of his fingertips.

Bucky falls, and Steve clings helplessly to the side of the moving train because even if he were to jump after him, they’re already miles apart.

Steve hears commotion behind him, so he pulls himself back into the train to fight more Hydra scum. He fights, and he screams and nothing will ever be the same, so he orders his men away--orders the rest of the mission team back to the engine room and to seal off the car. They’re good men. They don’t like it, but they obey even as the Nazis descend on Steve.

He fights them all alone. His shield is a mess of color and speed and death, and they die with gruesome grimaces of fear etched on their faces. Steve’s not being careful anymore. He’s taunting them, daring them, and they all come after him dying one by one by one.

The final man is sputtering out his last breath before Steve realizes that his suit is riddled with bullet holes. He falls to his knees as blood gushes from his chest, and he smiles as the white light reveals itself again.

_It was early November when snow started to fall on the SSR base in Italy. Most of the men grumbled and swore when the soft white flakes coated the earth, but Bucky laughed with glee and pulled Steve from his tent._

_They stood then, looking up at the starry night sky, and let the powder kiss their cheeks and tickle their lips._

_“I love you,” Bucky whispered, and Steve kissed him._

_The men knew who they were, and they didn’t say a word. Bucky had proven himself time and time again a capable and trustworthy Sergeant, and Steve was Captain America. The men of their unit would follow them anywhere. They no longer had to hide._

_Somewhere, across the campground, a lilting melody began to play._

_“Dance!” Someone shouted, and Steve didn’t need to be told twice. He wrapped his arms around Bucky and drew him close--let the music fill his senses and let the swaying of their hips ground him. Home was where Bucky was._

_“Do you remember this song?” he whispered._

_Bucky’s nose was pressed up against Steve’s neck, and he felt the smile against his skin._

_“I remember it felt like the end of the world was about to come, and there was nothing I could do to stop it,” Bucky murmured. “It was our last night together in Brooklyn. And I put the record on, and I wanted to hold you forever, but you were already fading from my grasp.”_

_“No,” Steve said, and Bucky looked up into his eyes. “No. It was a perfect formation of memory. This music is tied to my soul now. Even as it’s playing now I can remember your touch on my hand.” Steve intertwined his fingers with Bucky’s and brought his hand to his lips. “And the next time I hear it, it will mean even more.”_

_Bucky pulled him down for a kiss then, long, and tender and sweet. It tasted of youth, and Brooklynn summers, and two boys forever in love. Somewhere in the distance men were cheering, but Steve only had eyes for Bucky._

The serum begins its work, knitting flesh back together and pushing blood back through his organs. He comes to, fighting, fierce, and irresponsible coil of rage wound tightly around his organs. How dare they. How dare they turn him into this? How dare the serum keep bringing him back? He’s sentenced to this pain, this eternal life of suffering and loss, and he’s blind with the force of it.

They’re still on the train.

The Hydra agents are all dead--Steve’s surrounded by his men now. Falsworth is holding on to him, wrapping his arms as tightly as he can around Steve’s chest, and Duggan is holding his head, shouting at him. Steve blinks and the fight leaves him--he falls back limply to the floor.

The Commandos sigh in relief, sigh in despair. They all feel it--this devastating hole that Bucky used to fill.

Steve reaches out and gazes at his hand. His fingers are still encased in the leather combat gloves. He can almost see the shimmer of it then--the faint whispers of memory that Bucky left imprinted in his skin.

He can almost feel it dissipate around them all.

Peggy’s voice is loud and clear on the comms, and Steve feels another tear in his chest--another wound festering.

She doesn’t deserve this. He knows that like he knows the feel of charcoal in his hands. In another time, another life, another world, they’d have been perfect for each other. He tries to imagine it briefly then, as the plane tips further and further, and the air rushes by in deafening tones. Tries to imagine the feel of her body pressed against his and the tumble of her hair brushing his skin. He closes his eyes and tries not to faint as the pressure rises, and he hears himself promising a dance, and he’s swaying with her to the music.

His last thought as the Valkyrie crashes through the waters is that she doesn’t sing like Bucky used to.

_There was no white light in the ice. There was no heaven waiting for him, no last glimpse of happiness._

_Bucky fell and Steve watched and Steve screamed and Steve bled and still Bucky fell._

_**This must be hell** , he thought, and even as he screamed until his throat bled, he felt as though somehow it was justified. He watched Bucky zipline down the tree-lined slope and watched him land on the train and tried to get to him first._

_Bucky entered the train, and Steve followed and told him to stay behind, cover him, stay behind! But Bucky didn’t listen because Bucky would never listen._

_He fell._

_Steve ordered him to stay back with the covert operations group on the ground. Steve ziplined in and took out every Nazi and turned to see Bucky fighting. He’d disobeyed orders. He come in from behind._

_He fell._

_Steve ordered the commandos to take out the agents and held Bucky back, refused to let him forward from the rear of the train car._

_The Commandos went down under enemy fire and the train exploded and Bucky fell._

_These weren’t memories anymore. This was a new place, a horror held within his mind that he couldn’t escape from. He refused to lead the mission, and they stayed behind._

_Bucky stepped on a landmine and died._

_He didn’t enlist and stayed in their Brooklyn apartment, cleaning and painting and writing letters._

_Bucky died in combat._

_He tried every possible combination and every time Bucky died. Sometimes in his arms. Sometimes far away. Sometimes gruesomely, sometimes peacefully, always tragically._

_He yelled, and screamed, and cursed the memories that had lain dormant for so many years that now crept up to haunt him. He cursed the serum that forced him to life in the depths of the ocean._

When he comes to, his face is wet from tears.

“The defrosting is a painful procedure,” they tell him. “Even as an enhanced individual, you are very lucky to be alive.”

Steve doesn’t bother to correct them..

He fights smarter after that.

Steve Rogers likes his team. They’re smart and witty, and they are incredibly good at what they do. They go on missions together, and they save the world together, and Steve Rogers is a hero.

They think it’s what he’s always wanted, and they tell him so. He quips that he’s always been a hero.

_Bucky’s the only thing he’s ever wanted in life._

He walks the streets, and children and adults alike stop him to take pictures on their cellular phones and post them to social media accounts.

Steve doesn’t have a social media account, but he has a PR manager now who does everything for him: posts his pictures, writes his scripts, tells him what to wear, what to say, what to do.

It’s easy to be swallowed by the change in century, and that’s what Steve does. His fellow Avengers chide him for putting himself at risk too often and for not relying on their expertise as much as he should, but Steve knows.

He knows now.

He knows what his limits are, and he will never be stuck in a memory loop again.

He uses his SHIELD connections to secretly research and mete out hints at other serumed individuals. He knows that it’s unlikely that the secret died with Erskine, and he knows that if he can find another enhanced being who has died or reversed the process, then maybe he can find a path back to his perfect sliver of white light.

Find his way back to Bucky.

The world depends on him, but the world also has other heroes now. Steve has done enough. He’s earned a time for rest.

The Winter Soldier drops his mask, and Steve feels the shift of the planet beneath his feet.

Steve calls to him, “Bucky, Bucky, Buck!”

But even as the ghost runs, Hydra agents are swarming the helipad, and there is bile rising in his throat because they didn’t die when Steve did, and he didn’t stop anything. He hadn’t even gone back for Bucky.

He’s fighting and surrounded on all sides when Nat and Tony finally get there, but it’s too late. They’ve used some sort of magcuff on his arms, and he’s being held down by at least seven different agents and the shots start to ring out.

He has one last hope that the serum might still let him survive until the doorway opens, and white light spills into the hollow corridor, and he’s walking towards it, unable to turn away.

_Steve’s ma died when he was fourteen years old._

_She’d been sick for so long it was a relief in the end. They hadn’t much money, and she’d made him promise not to pay for the burial because he needed to save every penny to keep the apartment. Steve promised, but he knew he’d never keep it. She deserved her place in Heaven more than any other person he’d met in this life._

_He told the staff at the hospital to call Father Paul and he walked home to gather as many belongings as he could find to pawn for cash._

_Bucky showed up at his doorstep within minutes._

_He’d come with his own ma, dressed in her Sunday finest and bearing a large casserole dish that smelled of cabbage and ham. Steve looked at her strangely, confused and unsure of what was expected of him, but she swatted at Bucky, and he took the casserole dish into the small kitchen while she knelt down, pulled Steve close to her and wrapped her arms around his entire body._

_She held him close as he shook with sorrow, then she told him ‘under no uncertain terms was he to pay for a cent of the funeral with his own money, she’d already spoken with Father Paul and the service was paid for and set for three days hence.’_

_Then she held him in front of her, gave him a long look as she wiped a stray tear from his eye, and called to Bucky to be home before dark._

_Winnifred Barnes was an agent of the Lord._

_They stayed mostly quiet that evening. Bucky followed Steve as he paced round the small apartment, hands grazing each piece of worn furniture. He paused once, near a small dent in the plaster of the wall by the rocking chair, and Bucky took his hand and smiled._

_“She said she was going to whip my hide for that!”_

_“I remember,” Steve spoke solemnly._

_“What was it we were doing exactly? Alls I remember is blood pouring from your nose.”_

_Steve looked up at him. “What were we doing? I seem to recall you reenacting a switching Sister Agnes’s had given you at school that day. And you used me as your unwilling participant in the act!”_

_Bucky quirked a grin at him, and Steve continued, unsure of where the words were coming from, only sure that they needed to be spoken before they were buried completely. “She’d never have whipped you. She loved you.”_

_“She was clearly insane.”_

_Steve looked at the floor. “She loved you because I love you.” It was a mumbling, desperate attempt to say something before the moment was gone, but as soon as the words tumbled free from his adolescent mouth, Steve realized the audacity of what he’d done. He looked up, desperately, hope and terror warring for conquest inside his gut._

_Bucky was watching him carefully, all signs of impudent smirk vanished as though they’d never been. “She loved you because you love me,” he whispered, tasting the syllables on his tongue._

_Steve watched him, refusing to give way now._

_Bucky stepped forward, and the dull light of the lamp lit his face from below. Steve studied the lines of his jaw, the straight slope of his nose. He watched the spatter of freckles across the bridge of that nose shift ever so slightly as Bucky swallowed. Steve raised his eyes ever so slightly to gaze into Bucky’s, and they were bluer than any ocean could ever hope to be._

_“I love you too.”_

When he comes to, he’s lost a month.

He’s in the relative quiet of a small room that must be somewhere in the Avengers tower. The very technology alone surrounding him convinces him that there is no possible way he is in any kind of public hospital.

There’s a nurse sitting next to him, and he looks down at Steve’s open eyes and smiles.

“There we are.”

Steve just grunts. His mouth tastes papery and vaguely of cinnamon, and his eyes feel like someone’s gone and rubbed sandpaper against them.

The nurse stands and presses a few buttons at the head of Steve’s bed. “We’ve been waiting for you to come around for a few hours now. You’ve got a lot of folks who want to see you, but for now I’ve been instructed to keep it to just family. I’m going to stay here to monitor your vital signs, but you’re out of the woods as far as imminent destruction of your superhero body goes. You alright if I let him in?”

Steve just looks at him confused, the words bouncing about his brain like old BB gun pellets. He has no family left. But the nurse is still watching him, so Steve manages another grunt--this one in the affirmative.

*******

Bucky’s different now. He’s quiet, more reserved. There is an electricity that amplifies the room. He holds himself still in ways that are impossible to see, only able to be felt. His hair is longer now, and he wears it tied back subtly with only a few strands loose about his cheeks. He’s lost the boyish charm. Where once there was baby fat protecting him, now he is hard lines, chiseled muscle, lithe limbs.

His eyes, though, are still blue, furiously blue. The same blue that Steve watched fall thousands of feet below him. The same blue of the boy who laughed, the boy who pranked.

The boy who whispered _I love you_ through streets lined with market stalls in 1940s Brooklyn while townspeople pushed by, too focused on their various tasks at hand to witness the bloom of Steve’s cheeks.

He’s here, sitting on the side of the cot, in a room somewhere in Avengers Tower, and it all seems so unreal that Steve is convinced that maybe, just maybe, he finally was accepted at Heaven’s gate, and he’ll no longer have to wait in the purgatory of bright, white memories that churn within him.

Bucky leans forward and runs one finger down the slope of Steve’s nose. He pauses for a moment, rubbing at the small bump--a remnant of Steve’s past, a break from a schoolyard fight.

“So, serum can heal bullet holes, but not this disaster?”

Steve reaches out and touches Bucky’s hand then--pulls it away from his face and really studies those fingers. They are long, and the pads are calloused, and there is a tiny, white, star-shaped scar at the base of his thumb. Imperfect. Flawed.

Bucky.

“You love my nose. You’ve told me,” Steve quips, his voice settling in, raspy and fleeting, like dust and cobwebs blown from an old attic room.

Bucky leans in and kisses him.

It sets off a charge in the air that fills Steve with longing and heat. He kisses back, hard and desperately, and despite their surroundings, and despite the years that have past, and despite the guilt and the fear and the horror that he’s lived for a century, for the first time Steve stops fighting.

He’s home.

Bucky pushes away for a second, and the ghost of a boyhood grin flits across his face.

“I found you,” he says.

**Author's Note:**

> Come follow me on [Tumblr](http://iamagentcoop.tumblr.com)!


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